Collection Study
Philip Guston, Drive, 1969

Text by Craig Burnett
September 2015

Drive is a work from 1969 by Philip Guston (1913-1980). It is one of his earliest figurative paintings and exposes a character often repeated throughout his career, the Klansmen. That very character features abundantly in paintings such as The Studio (1969), Edge of Town (1969), Riding around (1969) or Flatland (1970), whether it be alone or in group. It directly refers to the Ku Klux Klan’s white supremacist members, taking this figure to build up a fictionalized narrative through which Guston could explore “What it would be like to be evil? To plan, to plot”. The use of this reference also enabled the artist to tackle issues inherent to the political violence of his time.

His works often explore the human condition and build a discourse around urban violence and racism. Starting from comic strips as a boy (in which Klansmen were already incorporated), Guston’s political realism was developed through Abstract Expressionism, of which he was an important member before turning to figuration in 1969, after a 2 year-long hiatus in his production resulting from an intense work period for a show he had at the Jewish Museum in 1966. Drive, thus, is an early painting of that period which both epitomizes the style he will explore until the end of his life and distinguishes itself from the rest of his production by its murky-muddy side.

This artwork was acquired for the David and Indrė Roberts Collection in 2013 to Timothy Taylor. Philip Guston’s works are also in collections such as the Museum of Modern Art (US), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark), Tate (UK) and Walker Art Center (US). He has been the subject of several exhibitions coming back to his work as a whole in the past few years at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen (2014), the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2014), the Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg (2014), and Timothy Taylor in London (2015).

DRIVE, HE SAID

The hooded figure in Drive rises from his car, a mound of brown the colour of chocolate, mud or shit, like magma from a volcano, or a bulb bursting from the earth in spring. If the title tells the viewer that the character is out for a drive, the overall sensation conveyed by the painting is an upwards motion, of erupting and becoming. Only once his eyes are clear of the ground can he look forward, start to drive. The black steering wheel extends from a roughly painted black line like a cartoon mallet, and could also double as the hood’s gasping mouth. The hands are pink and gooey, like fresh bubble gum or the skin of a newborn: the left clutches the side of his face as if to express surprise, or shock, while the right, ruddier, points to some event or destination, somewhere in the near distance, or distant future. The double patch of creamy green background indicates, with comic-book directness, a grassy knoll, even while its position in the painting makes it look more like a thick layer of vegetation on top of the car (or ground), as if the painting captured a cross-section of the earth.

Meanwhile, we have our hood and his black eyes, pried wide open in amazement. Ok, I’ve emerged from a long slumber beneath the earth – now what? Drive. Drive away from the mucky past and into the future. There it is, he seems to say. I can’t believe it. There is something there, just over the horizon. I have something to move towards, something to believe in. Drive, he tells himself.

Philip Guston was traipsing through his own gloomy purgatory when he painted Drive. The artist’s renaissance during the late 1960s is a well-rehearsed refrain in the annals of American art: after his show at the Jewish Museum in 1966, he stopped painting for about two years. This was not atypical: he generally stopped painting for some time after a major exhibition. Yet this time it was different. Times had changed. America had changed. The New York School was petering out, abstraction had lost its momentum, and America was no longer a land of promise but a fractured country at war – with itself, and with enemies on distant continents. Guston had problems much closer to home. He was estranged from his wife, Musa, so he left New York and spent months in Florida, where he started making pared-down, spindly ink drawings. In 1967, he reconciled with Musa, and together they forsook Manhattan for good. They moved to Woodstock, where he had a large studio on the same property as his house, and where he could paint through the night. He could no longer make abstractions, no longer get into ‘a frustrated fury about everything – and then [go] home to adjust a red to a blue’, as he said in 1977. He became intoxicated with things, with the here and now, feverishly making picture after picture in an attempt to resurrect himself. It started with objects on small panels and canvases: mugs, shoes, books, pictures of pictures – ‘all the objects of an intimate cosmology’, as critic Kay Larson described them.

The smaller paintings grew into larger ones, as with Edge of Town (1969), and with a work such as Flatland (1970), they became more complex, cluttered with objects and imagery. Both of these pictures featured a figure, or figures, from the Klu Klux Klan. After the summer of 1968 and the riots at the Democratic Convention, the ongoing Vietnam War, the turmoil of the age, he chose his everyman: the hooded bigot, a blank-faced figure of intransigent nastiness. And it was this hooded figure who became Guston’s constant companion during his change from mid-century abstraction and the ambiguous figuration that he practiced in the early to mid 1960s, to his late, bold, cartoonish mode that cemented his place in the pantheon of great painters. Years later, Guston recalled that he felt like a movie director, conjuring countless single-frame melodramas with a cast of gash-eyed, hooded thugs in both starring and supporting roles. Sometimes the hooded figure paints (for artists are as bad as everyone else), or we might find him about to beat the snot out of one of his fellow clan members – or a few of them might be overflowing from a jackass jalopy, looking for trouble, or for a sense of direction amid the era’s anarchy. With this black-eyed nobody cloaked in a white hood, Guston could express the savagery of his times, human history’s never-ending violence, and the relentless drive of the artist’s ego.

The figure in Drive is one of Guston’s stock characters from the period: the hood behind the wheel, coned head rising from the crudely painted car, menace on his mind. He appears in Riding Around and Edge of Town (both 1969) or Caught and a very small painting Untitled (Hoods in Car) (both 1970). Drive is a clear counterpart to the larger 1969 works, and yet in its differences we see what makes Drive so important, so revealing of Guston’s rush of thoughts and emotions at the time. One key difference is the car itself, painted in muddy earth tones, barely described beyond a mound-like shape and some rough black lines. The car is more mud than machine: it looks like Guston used burnt sienna, one of the so-called earth colours, a pigment named after the Renaissance city but also used by cave painters. But there’s something primitive and mucky about the whole painting too, something personal, as if it were painted as an afterthought at the end of the night, a note to the artist, a reminder to himself. The thick paint and uneasy lines suggest that he might have just finished a larger work like Edge of Town and painted another, smaller work, to clarify a few thoughts about this joyful, toilsome project he was undertaking: remaking himself as a figurative painter.

Guston became – again – a painter of anger, politics, protest: a painter of images. There is an intimacy to Drive, a secret, late-night thought, a final idea before walking through the dark back the house, where he’d have a plate of spaghetti left aside by Musa. Drive is a scruffy flourish that says: here I am, emerging from the earth, becoming a new painter, with the painter’s fat, fleshy hands in awe of their own power. It’s as if the painting says, ‘This is what I meant to say! This is where I am taking myself in my chariot of mud.’ Guston was fascinated by the ‘golem’ of Jewish folklore, the lumbering beast born of mud and desire. And here he is, a hooded golem emerging from the dirt, flabbergasted at his own power, or shocked that he’s even alive, has the power to move again. Drive is a visceral allegory of birth and transformation

I have made a similar argument about perhaps Guston’s best painting from that era, and among his greatest ever, The Studio (1969)¹. Both paintings feature a KKK hood, but the contrasts between the two works, the differences in composition and method, are even more telling.

¹ Burnett, Craig. Philip Guston: The Studio. London and Cambridge, MA: Afterall Books / MIT Press, 2014

About The Studio, Guston said that he ‘put in everything I knew about painting’ into the work, and he called it a ‘sophisticated picture’. Drive, by contrast, looks raw, sketchy and comparatively unsophisticated. The Studio has a forceful composition – Guston called it ‘very tightly organized’ and ‘carefully constructed’ – reinforced with references to the history of abstraction, Piero della Francesca, and the whole story of Western picture-making. Drive, on the other hand, is messier and much more personal, a late-night sketch or prayer, a message to himself. The composition runs out of space on the left side, the finger abutting the edge of the picture. Look at the sky: that’s a murky bluish-white, impure, a manifestation of the thoughts of a foggy-headed hood. Yet the green is garish, solid, opaque. It’s worth noting that the painting is on panel, a support that Guston used infrequently. Did he pick something up from the studio floor and start painting quickly, with an end-of-the-palette set of colours, trying to extend a particular idea that he had put aside earlier that day while painting a larger picture? I speculate wildly here, but it has that air about it: as careless and beautiful as an uncontrolled emotional outburst. If The Studio is an essay and a statement about Guston’s place in history, Drive is his lyric poem, his little sigh at the end of the night.

Guston loved reading and the company of writers, especially poetry and poets. He read Camus, Kafka and Kierkegaard, called writers his teachers. He collaborated with William Corbett, Bill Berkson and Philip Roth, among many others. I think the title Drive, laconic and direct, and key to illuminating this painting, might be traceable to the work of a poet he knew and loved, Robert Creeley. (Creeley said of Guston in an interview: ‘He knew my poems very well, not just as a form of flattery, but really knew them’.) But it wasn’t just Guston who knew Creeley’s work – and knew it by heart. In a recent article in the London Review of Books, Stephen Burt wrote that Creeley’s ‘I Know a Man’ may have been, ‘for a spell in the 1960s … the most often quoted, even the most widely known, short poem by a living American’. It was a poem that expressed the anxious mood of the era, its spare lines on the tip of a nation’s tongue.

I Know a Man

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,—John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.
- Robert Creeley

Guston was famous for his garrulousness: he was always talking. Talking to friends, talking to students, talking to dead painters late at night in his studio. You already own a goddamned big car, he tells himself – a car formed of mud and shit, a car of flesh, a car smeared on the wall from the oldest pigment on earth. You need to stick your head above the ground, look out where you’re going, point to the future, and drive. With Drive, Guston alludes to the history of painting, its fundamentally physical nature, by building a car with the medium’s earthiest colour. He fuses this idea with the artist’s drive to paint, and thus illustrates his resurrection as an artist. Here is the artist as a single-minded idiot, a startled carbuncle, vulnerable, alone on the landscape. Yet he has somewhere to go, something to see. What makes Drive a remarkable painting is how rough and personal it is: it’s a mumbled prayer, damp and heartfelt. In this little icon, Guston imagined himself emerging from the earth – half monster, half artist – and plotting a course for the rest of his life.